Greater>Than Clothing

Hey everyone! Seems like it has been ages since I tickled the keyboard to bring you any operational nuggets of Greater>Than. Honestly, I’m a little red-faced when I look back that my last blog post was in the summer. However, Greater>Than is picking up some serious momentum…believe it! So look for shorter yet more frequent updates from us.

First a quick career update…for about a year, Joey and I had worked together at a large Northwest-based software company. Then Joey had decided to make a career change (the right move by the way) and he now works for a large Northwest-based mobile-phone company. This meant we no longer worked together (booo!). Not long after Joey’s move, I was looking to solidify a bit of my future and the powers that be brought Joey and I back together in December. I tend to believe that good things happen to good people and ‘things’ just tend to happen for a reason. While we work hard at our day jobs, I am excited that Greater>Than has picked up some steam due to our daily proximity. It’s just easier to get together for lunch and discuss things. In fact, we have a meeting on the calendar for next week. We’ll post some details of that meeting for sure.

Hope everyone had a safe and happy New Years. You’ll be hearing from us a bit more often .

I’m an Atlantic reader and an unabashed word-nerd, so naturally one of my favorite features is the Word Fugitives column by Barbara Wallraff, (who wrote a book of the same name). Readers write in with requests for words to express particular situations or feelings, and other readers try to coin terms to fit the bill. Wallraff sifts through the results then writes her column, highlighting representative and outstanding examples. It’s fun collective nerdery and there are usually one or two gems.

In the most recent issue, answers to the following prompt are given:

“that happy feeling of kinship one feels for the driver of a car of the same make and model as one’s own”

My favorite answers included carma, carcissism, carmraderie and autobond. I told you I was a word-nerd.

Two Greater>Than-related things caught my attention while I was reading this month’s column:

I realized that Word Fugitives is just like Greater>Than

In fact, it’s an almost perfect illustration of the “curated crowdsourcing” model we use. The editor sets the rules of the game, a community member provides a prompt to focus the creativity of the group, solutions are submitted, the editor sifts through the submissions, then publishes the results back to the group. So simple!

Over time, the community becomes self-defining; the tone and quality of the output determined, is maintained and evolves over time through the collective efforts of the community. Think of an Ouija board. Nobody is “controlling” it, but everyone has a hand in determining direction. To put it another way, it is controlled by everyone and no one (no “one”).

One submission in particular blew me away Read the rest of this entry »

(Part 1) (Part 2)

As I continued to explore what Greater>Than meant to me, I realized that it could be an encapsulation not only of the product, but of the entire project. The name and symbol began to represent an ethos, a set of principles to anchor the development of the organization.

Greater>Than, to me, is both aspirational and inspirational*. It’s a statement of appreciation, a way to highlight that which is excellent. Therefore, the company must seek excellence in its operations as well as its products. This will require diligent, conscious effort, as every choice will either bring the company closer to this ideal or move it farther from it. Inevitably, mistakes will be made, but hopefully the symbol will act as a compass, a constant reminder of the correct direction. Read the rest of this entry »

(Part 1)

I’m not very good with blank pages. I find myself overwhelmed by their potential. Anything could be written there (not to mention drawn, etc.) and I know that whatever I scribble on the page isn’t as good as what otherwise could have been put there. When I get a new notebook I leave the first page blank out of respect.

In order to break myself out of that inertia I find that I often need to employ the use of what I’ve heard referred to as “liberating constraints”, those writing workshop games like “just keep your pen moving for 20 minutes” and “write about what you had for breakfast this morning”. It works. Try it. The most important thing is to move from inaction to action; from potential to kinetic. Even if you don’t think you have anything to say, you do, and you find this out as soon as you trick yourself into starting.

I used to think these techniques were somehow impure. I wanted to be able to call great, fully-formed ideas out of the ether. I’m still a big fan of those tremendous moments of inspiration, but I have come to understand that you can’t will them to happen. In fact, it’s best if you are already engaged in the creative process when they come. As Pulitzer winner and former Poet Laureate of the United States Ted Kooser put it, “…you need to be there writing and waiting, as a hunter might say, for that hour when at last the ducks come flying in.*” I’m learning that the art of writing, indeed of all creative activity, is to become adept at putting yourself in the mind-set that allows you to take advantage of those flashes of brilliance when you are lucky enough to earn them. Read the rest of this entry »

So what’s the big idea? Well, it all started out as a joke…

I like to think of myself as an “ideas guy”. I like to brainstorm and journal, just letting ideas spill onto the page. I get a big kick out of a creative give and take (even with myself). This manifests itself in many ways, like when I invent names for nonexistent bands (”Edgewood Arsenal*” and “The Piss Shivers**” are the first two I could remember - please don’t read too much in to that).

Ideas for t-shirt slogans also frequently pop into my head. One was something along the lines of “The sports team that plays in the city near where I live is superior to the sports team that plays in the city near where you live”. I’ve since seen very similar messages on actual shirts for sale, and it’s possible that I saw them before I came up with this, but at the time I believed it was original. Either way, I thought it was kind of funny (for a few reasons: it’s way too long to reasonably fit on a t-shirt, it underlines the absurdity of rooting for a city you don’t live in, etc.). It didn’t get the laughs I expected when I told some friends, though, and the idea probably should have died there. I didn’t know why, but for some reason I couldn’t get rid of it. Read the rest of this entry »